I access the names and numbers of land owners on taxrolls provided
free by the pertaining county's own website or website like
www.txcounty.com/ownersearch, ect.  These websites usually only
provide the land owner's name and address (when I either provide the
property id number, address, abstract number, ect).  To contact them
by phone, I have to manually type in the name and address info at a
search place like "yahoo! white pages," or "anywho.com," which becomes
time consuming when I have to deal with taxrolls of 200,000 people and
more.  What I need is some kind of program or software or something
that would enable me to match all the addresses with phone numbers by
the computer accessing the taxroll off one website and the phone
number search place of another website and matching them all, reducing
my work by one step, by not having to manually type in every name and
address for the phone number.  Also, as as extra if I could have
something where I could have the taxroll and type "100 acres or more"
and it would only give me all the owners and ph numbers with that
match.  I hope to find what I need.  Thank you for your time,
attention, and fast response.

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Clarification of Question by landsales-ga on 05 Nov 2002 18:20 PST

the correct reference to a taxroll website above is
www.txcountydata.com/ownersearch.asp, thanks

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Request for Question Clarification by mathtalk-ga on 09 Nov 2002 08:59 PST

Neither link given works for me, so I was unable to put together a
sample "data" scraping script for you.  Would you clarify how the site
is accessed?

thanks, mathtalk-ga

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Clarification of Question by landsales-ga on 11 Nov 2002 14:37 PST

correct website referenced above:
www.txcountydata.com
(will vary)select a county : waller, fort bend
names and address given with "owner search" entered

You can send the file you want phone numbers for to Telematch.  The
names and addresses must be in an electronic format, though.  Still
some work, but at least you are not searching each phone number
separately.  They charge about .10 per number matched.

Thanks for previous comment, but even paying 10 cents per ph number
lookup, will cost me well over 1000 dollars for one county, and I need
that about ten times, so either I have software written for me, but
I'll keep my question posted in case someone knows about an existing
software, which always cost less to buy than having to make a new
software program.

The generic name for this sort of thing is "screen scraping", a phrase
that evolved from methods for relating dumb-terminal output from
legacy mainframe style applications to "modern" (windowing) user
interfaces.

There are some good ideas out there about doing this in various ways,
e.g.

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=HTML+screen+scraping&btnG=Google+Search

but they are all more or less at the programming level.

If it were my project, I'd create some database tables (say in MS
Access, if I were going for the quick and dirty approach), and
probably clean up the HTML off the Web site in a decent
(macro-enabled) text editor, to an extent the data would import into
an Access table.

For the phone numbers it really sounds like you want to come up with a
way to pound the names and addresses into a site like Yahoo or
anywho.com.  I'm sure I could program something using a Winsock
control, but that might be overkill.  There's probably a clever way to
use MS Test to drive those URL's out.

regards, mathtalk-ga